IN SHORT

Published: January 29, 1984

FICTION

A FORBIDDEN LOVE. By Chayym Zeldis. (Berkley Books, $3.95.) Chayym Zeldis's latest novel is a Middle Eastern version of Romeo and Juliet in which an Arab girl and Jewish boy fall in love in Jerusalem amid circumstances assuring that tragedy and destruction are to be their fate. Mr. Zeldis is a gifted writer and, here, as in his earlier books, he demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the culture and history of the region. The flaws of ''A Forbidden Love'' have little to do with history or locale; rather, they are of a literary sort. The characters are too starkly painted, the plot is overladen with coincidence and entirely too predictable. It is hard to take the characters seriously since all of them are pure incarnations of good and evil - the bad guys smack their lips and the good guys, even in the midst of crises, are never less than well-mannered. As in ''West Side Story'' and other modern versions of the Shakespearean tale, the lovers are doomed from the start. Given the frequency of the warnings, posted as large as billboards and written on every other page, the characters appear more foolish than tragic when they finally do succumb to their fate. And then there is the matter of the author's point of view. There are good and decent Arabs and good and decent Jews among Mr. Zeldis's characters, but the Arabs seem to have the monopoly on evil. Depending on the point of view, one may or may not be disturbed by this fact.

But since war, bloodshed and other large events are the real villains in this story, the uneven distribution of goodness is less distressing than it might be in a more overtly political tale. The theme of ''A Forbidden Love'' - that the best and the brightest on either side recognize the ultimate futility of war - is ultimately spiritual and philosophical. - Fran Schumer

* THE CHRISTMAS MARY HAD TWINS. By Richard Shaw. (Stein & Day, $15.95.) The Christmas is that of 1969, and the shock waves of Vatican II's liberal reform are vibrating through the Roman Catholic Church. The twins are two plaster-of-Paris figures of the Christ Child placed in the creche at a church shared by two antagonistic parishes. The purpose of the twin images is to keep the peace. The purpose of the narrator is to keep both the faith and his peace of mind. He's Dennis Hogan, born in 1942, the youngest of nine children in a prosperous Irish-American family. Dennis, the novel's narrator, details his story from the time he began serving as an altar boy in the fifth grade, but the details are not surprising. There's Monsignor (soon Bishop) Maguire, who clouts the kid for cutting up during the Kyrie eleison; he eventually becomes a father figure. There's an older cousin, Mike, track star, cardsharp and all-around operator, whom Dennis hero-worships and who enters the seminary before Dennis's sudden decision to become a priest while he sleeps under the stars at Carcassonne, the summer after he graduates from college. There's the seminary, the martinets in charge, Dennis's nervous breakdown and his recovery with the aid of an agnostic Jewish psychiatrist and a priest who takes him off to Peru as a missionary. When Dennis finally is ordained, he's shipped to an inner-city slum parish, then transferred to a decaying mill town as chaplain at the county jail. Mike is on hand, and together they redeem a delinquent black teen-ager who has a future as both artist and basketball player. But the forces of reaction, epitomized by a brutish priest from Dennis's seminary days, are gaining strength against Pope John's reforms. Disillusioned, Dennis chucks the priesthood for an attempt at secular life. The meticulous detailing of the Catholic background and of Dennis's experience notwithstanding, this is not a well-made commercial novel. But Richard Shaw, who is himself a priest and prison chaplain, tells the story with an earnestness that makes it moving. - Sherwin D. Smith

* THE NAME OF ANNABEL LEE. By Julian Symons. (Viking, $13.95.) Dudley Potter is a bit of a nerd. He had a girlfriend once, but she ran off with his dad. This event so traumatized him that he left his native England for a job at Graham College, a bucolic institution in upstate New York. Dudley's soul lies dormant until a traveling avant-garde theater group involves him in audience participation, and he meets the blond and beautiful actress Annabel Lee. (Her mother had a thing for Poe.) But after a few months of passion, Annabel splits, leaving only a note: ''End of the affair. Sorry I have to go.'' Has she really ceased to care? Dudley must know and goes in hot pursuit, without even a sabbatical. The chase leads to a rendezvous in Boston's Combat Zone, then to England to a neo-Nazi pub in Fulham, a murder in Putney, and Annabel Lee's ancestral home (''the Kingdom by the Sea'') in Hampshire. En route there are various scenes of degeneration and wild goings-on among Dudley's old friends; he just gapes, ever bemused. Back in our own SoHo at ''the House of Usher'' (a sadomasochistic sex show with Annabel Lee as dominatrix), Dudley, who has shown no sign of deductive capacity so far, suddenly puts it all together. This reader stared in disbelief at the last page, thinking, ''Only this and nothing more?'' Julian Symons, a past master of the genre, can do better than this. The only things that seem to have caught his interest are his vivid and Juvenalian locations and background characters. Unfortunately, his social satire overshadows the perfunctory plot and zero of a hero, and all his Poetic references are not enough to make for suspense. - By Meredith Tax